Stiff Hands and Splintered Dreams

We dressed the rich and died poor. The factory had owned my fingers, my spine, my youth. Like street dogs that panted for their lives, I was old and exhausted from forty-three years of working at the corset and high-society dress factory, and today was no exception. Eventually, the grim and harsh world of London engulfed me.

The three-storey factory seemed like a lonely matchstick box in the middle of the dreary lane. A matchstick box it truly was—three austere, cuboid floors teeming with women adorned in muted shades of khaki, sea green, and apricot. Some of the women were lean, while others were stout. Those blessed with precious moments to spare fashioned their hair into intricate crown-like braids that swayed with each movement, not tucked away but rather framing their gaunt cheekbones like delicate sculptures. The females placed their stiffened hands, which resembled layers of stitched dead skin, in the right centre of the room– which was huge and resembled a warehouse lighted by the sun rays through every deliberate crack.

Floor One housed our wooden corset production for the upper-class women. On either side of the rusting machines that had strange appearances, there were four lanes of ladies standing and making adjustments to their corsets. In all honesty, they were compressing and suffocating. The cries of people who were wearing it were something I could imagine when each of the twenty-five ladies strapped the borders of the waist structure with a piece of bad rubber. A bandage was applied to the edges in a manner that was like strapping those blood pressure measuring devices; it was a painful and unpleasant experience. Each time a worker rolled those rubber sheets, I could hear a screeching noise. Once completed, these wooden corsets had a deceptive elegance that concealed their torturous nature. After being covered in glossy varnish, the shoulders' curve glowed with a dazzling radiance that matched the hues of the eastern pine wood, causing the workers' eyes to sparkle with hatred at their inevitable poverty, but at least they needn’t undergo the choking of their own works! 

Every other week, pompous and ill-favourable women would do themselves the favour of stepping out of their chateaus (which offered them no independence of their own and pained them with the obligations of the aristocracy and the unnecessary luncheons that followed) to acquaint themselves with the stifling corsets they’d have to wear—in hopes of becoming accustomed to them and not feeling uncomfortable. 

Today, on the other hand, I saw a dishy marquess who arrived with his young daughter—an uncommon sight because no men, apart from the delivery boys, enjoyed stepping foot into a crowd of women making dresses. But as I closely viewed them, it stunned me to see the nobleman’s attention to his daughter’s fitting. A young girl, innocent-looking and blissfully unaware of societal norms that were awaiting her, enjoyed her father’s company. As the tailor adjusted the corset to her slender chest, her sudden discomfort with the tightness of the hip fitting disturbed her father so much that he shooed the tailor away and refused to allow him to do anything further, akin to a gentleman driving away a berserk drunkard to save the damsel. Something about this sight kindled a glimmer of hope within me—and I cannot fathom why. Maybe it was the image of a ‘man’ wholly engrossed in tending to his daughter's needs, or the simple act of observing his genuine fascination in the little treasures she held dear, that stirred a newfound sense of hope within me.

That was only the first floor. The second storey was where I worked—in the fabric altering and rough design making of silk gowns. Each cubicle on the floor was equipped with a modestly sized teak wood table that could accommodate no more than twenty inches of fabric. The lampshades buzzed constantly, dazzling our ageing eyes and making them water. The light regulator was a metal thread covered in black silicon, and dimming or brightening it was very costly. I sometimes rose up from my comfortable chair in frustration, ready to pull the cord just like my employer recounted to me how Indian women made buttermilk – stringing ropes on either side of a wooden pole to curdle milk. Mr. Acker's peculiar mandated movements today included the "merry-go-round"—our nickname for the swishing, whooshing circular motion used to dry the magnificent gowns—to dry the soft silk cotton, lapis blue, empire gown-shaped dress silhouette, chiffon layered with cerulean blue silk in the bottom and upper body. The Viscountess Clancarty had commissioned it to match the Duchess of Kent's evening ball attire, and Mr. Acker, from his perch in the upper storey, insisted on meticulous treatment.

That upper floor was forbidden territory to us workers, though gossip flowed freely from its heights. Filled with men wearing three-piece suits, coloured black like their vile and diabolical hearts. Mr. Acker, the proprietor, took deep pride in the cosy cabin he built himself— far removed from what he deemed the unsavoury conditions below.

An hour before our shift ended, the entire second floor could hear his guttural speech. As soon as he caught a worker coughing hoarsely, he shooed us away via the creaky and half-broken doors, like the goat and the goatherd. Surely that was to speak in solitude to the handsome client wearing an aureate sheath gown. So sparkling was it that its mere glance left imprinted in my mind the rest of the day as soon as I left work.